conception. We understood them as continued endeavours--as a
struggle against adverse circumstances--for such a development
of individuals, races, species and societies, as would result in
the greatest possible fulness, variety, and intensity of life. It
may be that at the outset Darwin himself was not fully aware of
the generality of the factor which he first invoked for
explaining one series only of facts relative to the accumulation
of individual variations in incipient species. But he foresaw
that the term which he was introducing into science would lose
its philosophical and its only true meaning if it were to be used
in its narrow sense only--that of a struggle between separate
individuals for the sheer means of existence. And at the very
beginning of his memorable work he insisted upon the term being
taken in its "large and metaphorical sense including dependence
of one being on another, and including (which is more important)
not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving
progeny."(1)

While he himself was chiefly using the term in its narrow
sense for his own special purpose, he warned his followers
against committing the error (which he seems once to have
committed himself) of overrating its narrow meaning. In The
Descent of Man he gave some powerful pages to illustrate its
proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal
societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the
means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by
co-operation, and how that substitution results in the
development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to
the species the best conditions for survival. He intimated that
in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor